At today’s GC 2006 Expo I went straight to the 10 o’clock presentation from Adriana Cronin-Lukas from the Big Blog Company who had some excellent things to say about ‘social media’ in her seminar on ‘revolutionising the way that you and your team work’. Interestingly, while most had heard of blogs few had used newsreaders or heard of tagging. Some educational work to be done there with the public sector. (Perhaps a marketing idea with a product on social media for beginners?). Personally I was intrigued by Adriana’s mentioned of the way Disney has very successfully used Six Apart weblog’s for global cable operator shift work, termed ‘shiftlogs‘ (“They didn’t call it blogging, they just called it a ‘Shiftlog‘, which is what they’d always called it.”). This links back to my interest in shift handover applications for hospitals.

Anyhow by way of coincidence I’m off to the British Computer Society this evening to hear a talk from Surgeon Captain Peter Buxton, OBE, and Lieutenant Commander Mark Trasler on telemedicine in the armed forces, which may again touch on this subject. Particularly as Lt Cm Mark Trasler is reportedly down to look at the possible use of transferring the experience of the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme to the NHS.

Their fascinating talk on how the Navy is setting up a new health care reporting held some useful lessons for the NHS, for example in making sure (following the system problems thrown up by Gulf War Syndrome) that battlefield injuries are properly recorded. However, when I asked it they didn’t seem to have any plans for an electronic shift handover system within military hospitals. Lt Cm Mark Trasler instead suggested the Americans might be leading in that respect.